New Directions in the History of the Novel

Transcription

1 New Directions in the History of the Novel

2 Also by Patrick Parrinder OXFORD HISTORY OF THE NOVEL IN ENGLISH (general editor) NATION AND NOVEL SHADOWS OF THE FUTURE AUTHORS AND AUTHORITY Also by Andrew Nash KAILYARD AND SCOTTISH LITERATURE THE CULTURE OF COLLECTED EDITIONS (editor) Also by Nicola Wilson HOME IN BRITISH WORKING-CLASS FICTION (forthcoming)

3 New Directions in the History of the Novel Edited by Patrick Parrinder Emeritus Professor of English, University of Reading, UK Andrew Nash Associate Professor of English Literature, University of Reading, UK and Nicola Wilson British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Department of English Literature, University of Reading, UK

4 Selection, introduction and editorial matter Patrick Parrinder, Andrew Nash and Nicola Wilson 2014 Individual chapters Contributors 2014 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6 10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act First published 2014 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number , of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave and Macmillan are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN ISBN (ebook) DOI / This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Typeset by MPS Limited, Chennai, India.

5 Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Notes on the Contributors vii viii ix 1 Introduction 1 Patrick Parrinder, Andrew Nash and Nicola Wilson Part I The Material Text 2 Novel Designs: Manipulating the Page in English Fiction, Thomas Keymer 3 Textual Instability and the Contemporary Novel: Reading Janice Galloway s The Trick is to Keep Breathing On and Off the Page 50 Andrew Nash 4 The Early American Novel in Fragments: Writing and Reading Serial Fiction in the Post-Revolutionary United States 63 Matthew Pethers 5 Archive Fever: The Publishers Archive and the History of the Novel 76 Nicola Wilson Part II Literary Histories: Questions of Realism and Form 6 Memory, Interiority and Historicity: Some Factors in the Early Novel 91 Patrick Parrinder 7 A Gothic History of the British Novel 103 Nancy Armstrong 8 Critical Histories of Omniscience 121 Rachel Sagner Buurma 9 The power of the written word : Literary Impressionism, Politics and Anxiety 134 Max Saunders v

6 vi Contents 10 Virginia Woolf and Metonymic Realism: Making It New? 148 Pam Morris Part III The Novel in National and Transnational Cultures 11 Defining an Age of the Novel in the United States 165 Jonathan Arac 12 Between Modernism and the Postcolonial: Reading Patrick White and Malcolm Lowry in the 1970s 177 Mark Williams 13 Transporting Fiction: The Novel in a (Post)Colonial World 192 Simon Gikandi Part IV The Novel Now 14 Art Unseduced by Its Own Beauty: Toni Morrison and the Humility of Experiment 211 David James 15 The Dynamics of Residual and Emergent in the American Novel after Cyrus R. K. Patell and Deborah Lindsay Williams Index 237

7 List of Illustrations 2.1 Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub, 5th edn (1710), by permission of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto Roger L Estrange (trans.), Five Love-Letters from a Nun to a Cavalier (1678), by permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino Roger L Estrange (trans.), Five Love-Letters from a Nun to a Cavalier (1678), by permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino John Dunton, A Voyage round the World (1691), by permission of the British Library, London Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), by permission of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), by permission of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto Eliza Haywood, The Agreeable Caledonian (1728), by permission of the Bodleian Library, Oxford Samuel Richardson, Clarissa (1747 8), by permission of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy ( ), by permission of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy ( ), by permission of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto 44 vii

8 Acknowledgements In addition to all of the contributors to this book and to Palgrave Macmillan s anonymous reviewer, the editors would like to thank Warwick Gould and Jon Millington of the Institute of English Studies, University of London: Warwick for his advice on bringing the book to fruition, and Jon for his help in organising the conference from which these chapters stem. We would also like to thank and acknowledge the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) for funding the postdoctoral position to which Dr Wilson was appointed in 2008, and the English Department at the University of Reading for enabling us to continue working together beyond the end-date of the AHRC project. viii

9 Notes on the Contributors Jonathan Arac is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of English and founding Director of the Humanities Center at the University of Pittsburgh, USA. He also serves on the boundary 2 editorial collective. From 2002 until 2012 he chaired the Advisory Committee for the Successful Societies Program of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. He is Advisory Editor for the forthcoming United States volumes of the Oxford History of the Novel in English. Nancy Armstrong is Gilbert, Louis and Edward Lehrman Professor of English at Duke University, North Carolina, USA. Her books include Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (1987), The Imaginary Puritan: Literature, Intellectual Labor, and the Origins of Personal Life (1992, with Leonard Tennenhouse), Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism (1999), and How Novels Think: The Limits of Individualism, (2006). She edits the journal Novel: A Forum on Fiction. Rachel Sagner Buurma is Assistant Professor of English Literature at Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania, USA. Her work has appeared in Victorian Studies, New Literary History, Studies in English Literature, English Language Notes and the Oxford Handbook to the Victorian Novel. She is finishing a book project titled A Material History of Omniscience and beginning a book project on the history of historicisms (co-authored with Laura Heffernan). Simon Gikandi is Robert Schirmer Professor of English at Princeton University, USA and editor of PMLA, the official journal of the Modern Languages Association of America. His book Slavery and the Culture of Taste (2011) has won several awards including the James Russell Lowell Award of the Modern Languages Association of America. He is currently editing the Oxford History of the Novel in English, Volume 11: The Novel in Africa and the Atlantic World since David James teaches modern and contemporary literature at Queen Mary, University of London, UK. His books include Contemporary British Fiction and the Artistry of Space (2008) and Modernist Futures (2012). He has edited a number of collections including The Legacies of Modernism: Historicising Postwar and Contemporary Fiction (2011). With Rebecca L. Walkowitz and ix

10 x Notes on the Contributors Matthew Hart, he edits the book series Literature Now. He is currently editing The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction since Thomas Keymer is Chancellor Jackman Professor of English and Director of the Collaborative Program in Book History and Print Culture at the University of Toronto, Canada. His books include Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel (2002), Richardson s Clarissa and the Eighteenth- Century Reader (paperback edn. 2004), and, as editor, the forthcoming first volume of the Oxford History of the Novel in English. Pam Morris is an independent scholar, previously Professor of Critical Studies at Liverpool John Moores University, UK. Currently she is researching for a book on realism in the novels of Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf. Recent publications include: Realism (2003), Imagining Inclusive Society in Nineteenth-Century Novels (2004), and Woolf and Realism in Virginia Woolf in Context (2013, ed. Jane Goldman and Bryony Randall). Andrew Nash is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Reading, UK. His books include Kailyard and Scottish Literature (2007) and the edited volumes The Culture of Collected Editions (2003) and Literary Cultures and the Material Book (2007). He is currently completing a book on the Victorian nautical novelist William Clark Russell, co-editing a collection of essays on J. M. Barrie, and co-editing the final volume of The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, covering the period 1914 to the present. He is a contributor to Volumes 4 and 7 of the Oxford History of the Novel in English. Patrick Parrinder is General Editor of the Oxford History of the Novel in English and co-editor, with Andrzej Ga siorek, of Volume 4 in the series, The Reinvention of the British and Irish Novel (2011). His books include Authors and Authority (1991), Shadows of the Future: H. G. Wells, Science Fiction and Prophecy (1995), and Nation and Novel (2006), and he was general editor of the H. G. Wells editions published by Penguin Classics (2005 7). He is an Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Reading, UK. Cyrus R. K. Patell is Associate Dean of Humanities at New York University, Abu Dhabi, and Associate Professor of Literature at NYU in New York. He is the author of The Rolling Stones Some Girls (2011) and the forthcoming US Emergent Literatures. He is presently at work on a study of cosmopolitanism and its relation to the literary imagination, and is

11 Notes on the Contributors xi co-editor, with Deborah Lindsay Williams, of the Oxford History of the Novel in English, Volume 8: American Fiction since Matthew Pethers is a lecturer in American Intellectual and Cultural History at the University of Nottingham, UK. He is currently working on a monograph about serialization, temporality and the idea of the fragment in the early American republic. His essay I Must Resemble Nobody : John Neal, Genre, and the Making of American Literary Nationalism was published in John Neal and Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture, ed. Edward Watts and David J. Carlson (2012), and another essay, Thinking, and Not Thinking, About Servants in the Early American Novel, is forthcoming in Class and American Literature, ed. Andrew Lawson. Max Saunders is Director of the Arts and Humanities Research Institute, Professor of English, and Co-Director of the Centre for Life- Writing Research at King s College London. He is the author of Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life, 2 vols (1996) and Self Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature (2010). He has also edited several volumes of Ford s writings. Deborah Lindsay Williams teaches at New York University, Abu Dhabi and in the NYU Liberal Studies Program. Until 2010, she was Director of Honors and Professor of English at Iona College, New Rochelle, USA. She is the author of Not in Sisterhood: Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Zona Gale, and the Politics of Female Authorship (2001) and articles on US middlebrow fiction. She is a presently at work on a study of the literature and culture of women in the Arabian Gulf region and is co-editor, with Cyrus Patell, of the Oxford History of the Novel in English, Volume 8: American Fiction since Mark Williams is Professor of English at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand. His most recent books are Maoriland: New Zealand Literature (2006), written with Jane Stafford, and The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature (2012), which he edited with Jane Stafford. He is currently co-editor, with Ralph Crane and Jane Stafford, of the Oxford History of the Novel in English, Volume 9: World Fiction in English to Nicola Wilson is a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Reading, UK. She is completing a monograph entitled Home in British Working-Class Fiction (2014) and editing a collaborative

12 xii Notes on the Contributors book called The Book World: Selling and Distributing Literature, (2014). Her AHRC-funded research using the Archive of British Publishing and Printing at the University of Reading has appeared in English Literary History, in Prudes on the Prowl: Literature, Obscenity and Censorship in England, 1850 The Present Day (2013), and in Volume 4 of the Oxford History of the Novel in English: The Reinvention of the British and Irish Novel (2011).